“It is, in fact,” Jerry told her, “but even if it weren’t, you don’t want to be wandering around the city streets after dark.”
“I like the city streets,” she objected, “and I wouldn’t be ‘wandering around,’ I’d be walking from here to Little India, and straight to the hotel.”
Luther said, “Kim, you have enemies in Singapore. You really do have to remember that.”
Which brought her up short. It was true, she did have at least one enemy in Singapore, in Richard Curtis. And Richard Curtis had people everywhere.
Would some of those people be looking for her? Would they have her picture? Would that awful man, that killer from the boat who’d chased her in Brisbane, be here now in Singapore, waiting for further orders from Curtis? He’d accidentally stumbled on her once; could it happen again? Could she be walking peacefully along a well-lit city street in Singapore and suddenly have a car stop beside her, that man appear again, with his friends?
“All right,” she said, “I’ll take the taxi.”
At the hotel, the cab was just pulling up to the curb when someone came bustling out of the gaudy entrance, waving his arm. “You have another customer,” Kim told the cabby, and climbed out, leaving the door open.
It was the man with the Polaroid camera. He hurried into the cab, looked quickly over at her, then shut the door and rolled the window up before telling the cabby where he wanted to go.
Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not snooping, she told him inside her head. What do I care where you’re going, it’s nothing to do with me. She turned away as the cab sped off, and went into the hotel, and up to her room.
The television set offered two channels in English, 5 and 12. Kim, restless, switched back and forth between the two for a while, then turned it off and went looking for the magazine she’d started reading on the airplane and never finished, a three-month-old copy of Scientific American.
At first, she couldn’t find it. She knew she’d put it on top of the free tourist magazine that had been in the room when she’d arrived, but it was no longer there. Nothing was on top of that magazine. Had she moved it somewhere else?
She searched the room, failed to find the Scientific American, then decided to see if there could be anything at all to read in the tourist magazine. She picked it up, and the Scientific American was underneath.
That’s not right, she thought. She’d never touched the tourist magazine before this second, so how could hers be under it? The maid hadn’t been in here since they’d gone out to dinner. No one was supposed to have been in here.
She searched the room once more, carefully, the drawers and the closet, and when she was finished she was sure. There was no doubt in her mind. Someone had searched the room.
7
The White Swallow, where Jerry and Luther were to meet Mark, was off Orchard Road not far from Istana Park, a quieter, more restrained place than many of the discos in Singapore, most of them awash with light and noise. British expats came to the White Swallow, and discreet bureaucrats and traveling businessmen. Downstairs were the dark bar in front and the dance floor in back, while upstairs was a quiet dining room.
Jerry and Luther had eaten dinner here before, but not tonight. Tonight, all they needed from the White Swallow was an after-dinner drink and a conversation with Mark.
But they only got the former.
They’d arranged to meet at nine-thirty. Jerry and Luther had arrived fifteen minutes early. They sat at the bar, a long crescent moon, its facade decorated with chrome swallows in flight. The bird theme was maintained throughout the place, upstairs and down, but most completely at the bar, where the counters and shelves along the backbar were covered with representations of swallows, brought here or sent here by customers from around the world. They looked at the birds, they drank their drinks, and at ten to ten Jerry said, “Something’s wrong.”
“Maybe he fell asleep,” Luther suggested.
“Do you think so? I’ll go phone him.”
Jerry did, and when he dialed Mark’s number he got Mark’s answering machine. He told it, “Jerry here, and where are you?”
Then he went back to Luther: “Answering machine.”
“Then he’s on the way.”
But he wasn’t. At ten-thirty Jerry said, “Maybe he thought we said ten-thirty,” but by ten forty-five that was looking untenable, too. “Something’s definitely gone wrong.”
Luther said, “We should go back to the hotel, we’ll find out tomorrow what happened.”
“This is very frustrating,” Jerry said.
“It is.”
“And worrisome.”
“That, too.”
They taxied back to Race Course Court, where the desk held two messages for them. The first was from Mark, and it read: “Empress Place 12:30 tomorrow.” The second was from Kim, and it read: “Whenever you get in, call me. I’m awake, and I want to hear everything.”
“Oh, God,” Jerry said. “You call her, Luther, I don’t think I could go through it twice.”
8
Richard Curtis had many projects afoot, in many parts of the world, but his days seemed to be increasingly filled by the one project he couldn’t admit to in public. Wednesday morning was supposed to be devoted to the first consultation with the architects on the Kanowit Island construction, but there were two interruptions that morning, both having to do with this other matter, which seemed lately to be consuming more and more of his life.
Well, that was only right, in a way. Of all the projects, this was the only one that could save his life.
He’d been meeting with the architects, in the large conference room, for less than fifteen minutes, looking at the rough sketches, the general plans, placement of the airfield, the tennis courts, the offshore protected scuba area, when Margaret came in with a note: “Mr. Tian in your office.”
“Thank you, Margaret,” Curtis said, and to the architects he said, “I beg your pardon, this won’t take long, but I do have to see this gentleman.”
He left them huddling over the plans, muttering together, and returned to his office, where Jackie Tian stood at the windows, looking out. He nodded at Curtis and, by way of greeting, said, “You do like views.”
“Some of them,” Curtis said. “Sit down, Jackie, how’s Hong Kong?”
“Pestering,” Tian said, and joined Curtis at the L of sofas making up the conversation area.
Jackie Tian was a tough Hong Kong Chinese, a blunt short man with a hard-muscled compact body and heavy bony forehead, who had been an official with a rather corrupt trucker’s union when he and Curtis had first met, years ago. He’d been one of Curtis’s more useful contacts in Hong Kong, part of that web of influence and power he’d had to leave behind when the mainland bastards took over. Though the city’s new rulers had cleaned up that union pretty well, nothing had ever been proved against Tian, and he was still there.
When this plan had come to Curtis, he had known that Jackie Tian was the perfect man to put together the work on the ground. Because of various criminal convictions from his early days, Tian couldn’t get permanent residence for himself anywhere in the world outside Hong Kong (or, now, China), and he had as much reason as Curtis to hate the city’s new rulers, so he’d been very willing to listen to Curtis’s scheme, and to become an active part of it. He was the one who’d found the crews in Hong Kong, had put together the front corporations, had started the construction.
Tian didn’t know the whole scheme, of course. If Tian were to find out what the end result of all this labor was meant to be he wouldn’t for a second go along with it. He wouldn’t be able to go along with it. So he knew only what he had to know; he knew about the gold.
This was their first meeting in a month, and Curtis was anxious to know how Tian was progressing, so when they sat at right angles to one another on the sofas he said, “How are we coming along?”
“Slow,” Tian said.
Curtis frowned. “Jackie, we have to get moving on this. Th
e longer it takes, the greater the chance somebody will notice something.”
“It’s tough, Mr. Curtis,” Tian said. “The land, the permits, all that was easy. Easier than when the Brits were in charge. But now we’re in construction, and that part’s slow.”
“Construction doesn’t have to be slow, Jackie.”
“Not going up,” Tian agreed. “We’re doing that like normal, we’ve got a perfect construction site there, you can’t tell a thing.”
“Good.”
“But going down, that’s something else.”
“Why?”
“We can only do it at night,” Tian pointed out, “and we’ve got to be slow because some of those bank buildings have motion sensors. We aren’t in the banks, but we’re close, and we’ve got to be careful. Then, when we open a wall, we’ve got to close it again every morning. It all takes time, Mr. Curtis.”
Of course it did. Curtis knew very well that too much haste could destroy this project, make somebody suspicious, alert the wrong people. But he felt such pressure on himself to get it done and finished and behind him that he found it hard not to exert that same pressure on Tian. “We have to get moving on this, Jackie,” he said. “What if we hired more men?”
Tian shook his head. “Mr. Curtis, we got to keep this secret, and that means I got to hire men I already know, that I know I can trust to keep their mouths shut. I’ve already got them all. There’s nobody else in the world that I’d want down in them tunnels.”
“All right,” Curtis said. “We had to make six connections. How many are done?”
“Three.”
Curtis didn’t like that at all. “Jackie, what are we looking at here? Another month?”
“Shorter than that,” Tian assured him. “We’ll have the fourth done this week.”
“Can they work seven days?”
Tian considered that. “Well, maybe,” he said. “For a lot of money.”
“Not a problem.” Since Curtis was spending his future anyway, risking everything on this one gamble, it hardly mattered what commitments he made.
“If we did seven days,” Tian said, “we might be done in fifteen, maybe less.”
“Do it,” Curtis said. “And is the submarine there?”
“Got delivered last week. The box said it was a fuel storage tank, and that’s what it looks like.”
“It will do the job, though,” Curtis said.
Tian shrugged. “If you say so. I don’t know what you want it for.”
“Another part of the operation,” Curtis told him. “You’ll see it on the day.”
“Fine,” Tian said. “I’d hate to ride in it, I’ll tell you that.”
“The submarine?” Curtis shook his head. “No one’s going to ride in that. That isn’t what it’s for.”
“Well, it’s down in the finished part of the basement,” Tian said. “In its box.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
“You’re coming over?”
“Yes.”
Tian nodded. “I guess you have to. When?”
“Next week.”
“I don’t know,” Tian said, and frowned. “You know we’re not gonna be ready next week.”
“I can’t wait,” Curtis said. “Jackie, I Just can’t wait any longer. I’ll help dig.”
Tian laughed, but Curtis meant it.
* * *
He was back with the architects for less than half an hour, after saying goodbye to Tian, who’d fly back to Hong Kong this afternoon, when the second interruption came. This time, they were discussing the cisterns under the tennis courts. Being a coral island, Kanowit had no ground water to speak of, so the resort would depend for its water on collecting rain, and the most useful surface for that purpose would be the tennis courts. They would be sloped, too minimally for any player to notice or be affected by, and rainwater would drain to a downspout into a deep cistern on which the courts would be built.
They were looking at the options for the filtration systems that would be needed, and the most efficient way to move the water to the hotel buildings, when Margaret returned with another note: “Mr. Bennett is in the small conference room.”
“Damn it,” Curtis said, “this is somebody else I absolutely have to see. I’m sorry, I promise this will be the last interruption.”
The architects assured him they had nothing but time, and he went away to see Colin Bennett, who already looked less hangdog and more like his former self. The new clothing helped, and so did the confident smile.
Curtis shut the door behind himself, didn’t bother to shake hands, and said, “Did you find him? So soon?”
“I’ll have him today,” Bennett said. Even his voice was more self-assured. “I thought I had him last night, but something must’ve gone wrong.”
“Wrong? Are they alert? Do they know you’re watching?” Curtis was suddenly aware he might have picked the wrong man for this job, or a man who was no longer right for this job or any other.
But Bennett smiled an easy smile and said, “They don’t have one idea about me. What happened was, they talked on the phone yesterday around six to somebody named Mark.”
“From here?”
“Don’t know yet. Another poofter, apparently. They made an arrangement to meet at the bar at the White Swallow last night at nine-thirty. That’s one of your more discreet places for fellows like that. Not for the hot young lads, you know, more for their uncles. Fellows who carry umbrellas, you know.”
“You went there?”
“It wasn’t exactly as easy as that, Mr. Curtis,” Bennett said. “I don’t look like their customers, you know. So I have this neighbor of mine, in the flats near me, he is more their style, and he’s as hard up as I’ve been lately, or he wouldn’t be living there. So I offered him twenty dollars plus drinking money to do my watching for me. We drove over, got there a few minutes before the time, and when I looked in they were already there. I pointed them out to Fan—he’s the chap—and he went in and made some new friends, and I sat in the car just down the block. Fan’s job was to come out and give me the high sign when this Mark showed up, so I could get his picture, but he never showed.”
“Scared off?” Curtis asked. “By what?”
“Beats me,” Bennett said. “Your two fellas stayed there at the bar almost two hours. Two or three times, I went to the door and looked in. Just to be sure Fan was keeping his mind on the job at hand, and there was Fan, and there was the two, and nobody else. Later on, Fan told me they looked at their watches a lot, and after a while one of them went to make a phone call, and finally they just up and left. I gave Fan money for a taxi, and scooted off back to the hotel myself, so I’d be there before them, which I was. And the first thing they did was call the girl, room to room.”
Smiling, Curtis said, “Did they.”
Bennett laughed and shook his head. “All they had to do was walk down the hall and talk to her face to face, and I wouldn’t know a thing right now. But they phoned her instead.”
“So you heard it.”
“And I heard them say this Mark stood them up, and they didn’t know why, but when they got back to the hotel there was a message from Mark they should meet him today at Empress Place at twelve-thirty.”
Curtis frowned. “Empress Place? That’s the big hawker stand off the Fullerton Road, isn’t it?”
“That’s the one.”
“I’ve never been there,” Curtis said, “but you see it from the bridge. It’s huge, isn’t it? How does anybody find anybody there?”
“That’s their problem, Mr. Curtis,” Bennett said. “I’ve already found my pair. And when they find their friend, why, I’ll find him, too.”
9
Kim sat in the crowded bus, gazing at the teeming city they crept through. She’d told Jerry and Luther this morning about her discovery that her room had been searched, and was pleased when they didn’t waste time doubting her. Jerry said, “Somebody’s followed us, that’s what it is, from Aust
ralia. Maybe that’s why Mark didn’t show up last night.”
“We’ll soon know,” Luther said.
They got off the bus at Esplanade Park and crossed to Empress Place, a large open-air pedestrian area overlooking the Singapore River. The sprawling hawker center nearby was open-air, with booths and stalls for the food vendors and many tables, some in dappled shade, many in direct sun. The place was crowded and busy, but they soon found a table.
Luther looked at his watch. “Twelve-thirty exactly,” he said, “I’ll tell you the truth, Kim, I’d like it if he would show up this time.”
“You think he might not?”
“I was sure he’d appear last night,” he said, “and I was wrong.”
They ate, ordering food from three different stalls, and the food was all good. But where was Mark? They’d taken their time, and here they were, finished, and here Mark wasn’t. Their only choice, Jerry said, was to wait, to give him, say, an hour. Though that hadn’t worked the last time.
Kim said, “I’m going to wander,” choosing the word deliberately, and got up before either of the men could tell her not to. “I won’t go far, I promise, and I won’t be away long. And if I see your friend’s here. I’ll come right back.”
There wasn’t much they could do but look dubious, which they did, and which she ignored. She got up and roved among the stalls and the many people eating their lunches. Beyond the hawker center, the city itself from here looked serene, the tall new glass office blocks rising smoothly among the old colonial-era buildings, the traffic sweeping by on the Anderson Bridge, the river endlessly flowing, the white Empress Place Building massive without being intimidating. She walked among the crowds for about five minutes, and was away from the hawker center entirely, over by the Empress Place Building, when a young man, Caucasian, slender, in white shirt and dark slacks, stopped in front of her, and said, “Here.”
Automatically, she took the folded piece of paper, and he hurried around her and off. When she turned, astonished, to call after him, he was walking briskly away toward Cavenagh Bridge.
She looked at what he’d handed her and it was a sheet of white paper, folded twice. A note.
Forever and a Death Page 23